Not bothered: Michael Tilson Thomas and the LSO play Cage, Beethoven and Bartók
Michael Tilson Thomas, Julia Fischer and the LSO
Barbican
Stalls S45, £5
30 May 2019
Barbican page
Programme
Cage, The Seasons
Beethoven, Violin Concerto
Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra
Cage’s The Seasons left me pretty cold, but no doubt the addition of Cunningham’s original choreography would give it more weight. As it is, on this first listen I’m not sure it stands alone as a concert piece; there are plenty of pretty ideas but rarely amounting to more than attractive background music, however sensitively performed by the LSO.
Julia Fischer gave a professional, accomplished and ever so slightly not-bothered performance of the Beethoven, coolly virtuosic but nevertheless blandly disengaged from the orchestra. I suppose Michale Tilson Thomas should take some of the blame for that; for its turn the LSO was neat and tidy but with little to spark the players’ imaginations there consequently was not much to take home from the audience.
As such, the Bartók was left head and shoulders ahead in the programme, hardly something to complain about given the vivacity and joyous imagination of this piece – but I’ll complain anyway: the Concerto for Orchestra is heard so often nowadays that while this performance was terrifically entertaining in the context of a programme that seemed otherwise to go through the motions, it wasn’t a match for others by this very orchestra, such as the hair-raising Rattle rendition some months ago.
Still, that a technically sound and musically interesting concert should move me so little shows how spoilt I’ve become by the usual standards on offer at the Barbican.
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